MySongBook lesson – Learn “Yellow” by Coldplay

Our picking expert Jeremy, has prepared a beautiful arrangement to celebrate the end of the year. Learn to play the song “Yellow” by Coldplay, especially rearranged for acoustic guitar. This exclusive arrangement is available at mySongBook.

This article was submitted by Jeremy Cauliez, transcriber at mySongBook.

Presentation of the piece

“This piece is arranged in a classical picking style. It doesn’t present any major technical difficulties. However, be careful not to lose the tempo and to play it in triple feel. Firstly, I suggest you start off with just the chords and alternate the bass parts on the metronome beat.

Key points to work on:

• Bar 9: the bass quaters are played in the “superpicking” style, that is to say back and forth with your thumb (or a fingerpick if you use one).

• Bar 12: you must be careful in this bar, because it introduces the first sixteenth notes of the song. So don’t rush.

• Starting from bar 15: we find a position of C shaped F, which brings us to the middle of the fretboard. So it will be necessary to make the transition between the chords carefully and smoothly. The exercise I suggest is to set your metronome to a very slow tempo and play the chords F, Am7 and G as whole notes and just loop them (just full chords, one per time).

I hope you will enjoy playing this piece! See you soon on mySongBook.com!”

About the author

Jérémy Cauliez started playing the guitar with various Rock bands. After a year at the Valenciennes CMA school (Centre de Musiques Actuelles – France), he created the gypsy Jazz band “Manaswing” with Eric Legrand and Yann Gérardin. 6 years of playing live and one album followed.

Jérémy then decided to turn to Fingerstyle and Picking. He has been writing arrangements for mySongBook since February 2012. He is now working on an album of his own compositions for solo guitar.